It’s the enshitification of triple AAA titles fucking slapping surcharges on EVERYTHING; day one dlc, microtransactions, always online DRM, the ability to revoke access to the shit we pay for, it’s death by 1000 cuts. EVERY anti-consumer action, every attempt to squeeze more of us while delivering the same rehashed shit over and over. Yup I will keep playing my old consoles and the games I own. The intent of us withholding our money and refusing to purchase your shit is to provide publishers with a sense of pride and accomplishment for retaining their customer base.
Anon is worried about AAA sales
Submitted 1 month ago by Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works to greentext@sh.itjust.works
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/b4f4341f-8092-4563-b1e3-1fb7da0e3bf9.jpeg
Comments
Washedupcynic@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Ya know what was an awesome game that just fucking worked? Granted I think it had hats or some shit. But pico park. Great game that worked awesome and didnt need any bullshit. Idk just came to mind.
dustyData@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Poignantly, not AAA.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
AAA knows that their primary competition is old games, that run better on more hardware, and are just better games.
Via a combination of acting like a cartel in a market, and also personally being basically unimaginably vain… they distort reality around them to the greatest extent that they can, to continue to convince people their overpriced garbage is actually the hottest shit and you’re some kind of horrible bad person if you don’t pay them.
That’s why they have entire networks of access journalists, why they constantly write essentially op-eds that follow the meta, or the meta-meta of the actual video game industry, why AAA games have marketing budgets bigger than Hollywood movies.
It is literally a propaganda machine.
Piracy is morally superior to feeding these nepo baby gaslighting rainbow capitalists that love to pretend they’re progressive.
They’re not progressive, they’re entitled faux nobility, delusional narcissists that live in hugboxes that reward complancency and not rocking the boat.
ferrule@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
What I find utterly asinine is it seems like the even care less about profits than they do feeding their egos and following this shit model of operation. Building shit games, injecting all the dlc, microtransactions crap and then charging so much no on wants to buy more. I constantly overspend on GOG and the like because its easy to get me in the door. If I have to save up to buy a game I have a lot of time to talk myself out of it.
ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
I’m going to school right now for game design. I’m an international student hoping to work here after too. I’ve put all my eggs in this basket, I barely even have enough estimated money for a plane ticket home if I don’t get work right out of school
Let AAA burn. I want to see it collapse, I want to see all the big game companies shutter. Now is such a great time to see indie studios going wild making pieces of art and I want people working there instead
yakko@feddit.uk 1 month ago
May each of those big ass studios perish and may their market share become a financial whale fall for you and your peers’ wonderful, impossible indie game passion projects.
shweddy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I hope you go far friend and I hope to play something you’ve had a part in making one day
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I’d say now if you are an honest Dev youll get way more respect from the community than ever before. I can’t stand these liars.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 1 month ago
AAA profits are higher than ever. Layoffs are tremendously inefficient. They do nothing to reduce costs long term, and can actually lead to increased costs. There is a dearth of economic research which demonstrates that.
Layoffs are corporatist virtue signalling. Nothing more.
rafoix@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Shareholders only want short term gains so they could sell their shares and win big.
Long term goals are for the suckers that bought the artificially inflated stocks.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 1 month ago
Layoffs actually tend to artificially deflate stock prices as it’s seen as a signal of a company in financial stress. Of course this can be used to turn a profit through short selling but you’d need to have some sort of prior knowledge to set up the short positions prior to the layoffs being announced.
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
They’re a temporary bump in the metrics which are measured by shareholders. They’ve also become short sighted morons who only care quarter to quarter and not long term sustainability. Why? Because the average age of most of the larger ones are other companies ran by people well over 60 who will die before it happens.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 1 month ago
collapse of the entire western AAA gaming industry
Don’t threaten me with a good time.
EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
It absolutely does need it. It’s needed it for several decades at this point. Layoffs in the past few years have been higher than they were during the 2008 recession, and that’s a year after year stat, not combined. Every year has had worse layoffs than after one of the worst financial collapses in recent history. Wages have been stagnate since I was in college almost 20 years ago and realized that I made more at my summer job than I could expect to make starting out as an artist in the industry, and I’d be walking in with a bunch of college debt.
Let it burn and watch the new studios built by people who make games, not corporate finance bros, rise from the ashes like new growth after a brush fire, full of passion for making good games first and foremost.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 month ago
criss_cross@lemmy.world 1 month ago
No love for the eisbrecher version?
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 month ago
(It’s the first time I hear this band, and I’m fucking loving it.)
Let’s do it differently: Eisbrecher’s version when the A³ gaming industry dies, Bach’s when the pop music industry dies, and Evangelion’s when Hollywood does so. Deal?
Bad_Ideas_In_Bulk@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Start making better games.
thermal_shock@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Even better.
Stop charging us again and again for the same shit just cause it’s on a newer system.
Stop blocking backwards compatibility just to charge us again.
Stop attacking rom sites because they have a file of a game you stopped supporting or selling 40 years ago.
Make better shit.
Stop nickel and diming us with “dlc” on your unfinished piece of trash.
Stop micro transactions.
Stop attacking your fucking customers and bleeding us dry.
Shareholders gotta eat I guess.
Bad_Ideas_In_Bulk@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Those are fine ideas, but most people are really not even that picky.
Make it good, price it even halfway reasonable, people will buy it. Lots of games are selling well.
(Maybe stop spending half a billion on the budgets if you want to be profitable, instead of trying to squeeze more out of the players.)
Sabata11792@ani.social 1 month ago
It’s easy problem to fix they just have {YOU MUST OWN THE PREMIUM BATTLE PACK FOR $9.99/MONTH* TO VIEW THIS CONTENT}
RamenJunkie@midwest.social 1 month ago
I don’t mind passes honestly, but also they should not expire. I paid for that shit, let me finish it, if it takes a week or a month or a decade, let me finish it at my own pace.
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
But then they’d have to make sure you have access to the game for that long [̲̅$̲̅(̲̅ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°̲̅)̲̅$̲̅]
dukatos@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
- paid annually
ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
But you save 5% that way!
WraithGear@lemmy.world 1 month ago
let AAA and AAAA fail. indie devs would have a much larger platform. current gen equipment is too expensive as it is and will get worse.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 month ago
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 month ago
suggested scummvm price is fuck off money, i got three headed monkeys on my back
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Survey from Consumer Reports here. Representative sample of 2022 people.
“Still playing gaming systems released before 2000” in this case means “has used at least one gaming system released before 2000 at least once in the past year.”
What you probably imagined is probably very different from what the actual survey reported.
Denjin@feddit.uk 1 month ago
If I play Streets of Rage 2 (1992) but on an emulator running on my Steam Deck (2022), does that count?
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
By their metric, no.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
It’s not a great metric since systems from before 2000 can be emulated on newer hardware, and in fact that’s the most common way for people to play old games.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I actually don’t know that it excludes emulation (or to what extent it excludes it). Like I wouldn’t count emulating an NES game on a Switch, but when I pop an actual PS2 DVD into my computer, burn it to an ISO, and play it on PCSX2 – when I own two functioning PS2s, dumped the BIOS, and help work on the emulator – I would probably ultimately answer “yes” to this question.
But it also seems clear that the person writing it knew almost nothing about retro gaming to have not clarified this even a little.
CptOblivius@lemmy.world 1 month ago
People still read classic books, watch classic movies, go to see classical art and listen to classical music. Why would video games as an entertainment art form be any different?
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 month ago
People need to stop reading books from before 2000 and only read books with Kindle’s unlimited plan! Think of the shareholders!
glandrid@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
line must go up
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
GOOD. The AAA gaming industry deserves to be destroyed, the main thing is they’re happy to be considered art but don’t treat it that way at all.
Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
If I were to come up with my top 10 favorite games list, I believe more then half would be indie.
RamenJunkie@midwest.social 1 month ago
I am not sure I have even played ten of the biggest “AAA Titles”.
Especially not while they were the current hot shit game. I don’t buy anything that isn’t in a bundle or 75% off.
dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This could literally cause the collapse of the entire western AAA gaming industry.
Wouldn’t be the first time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
TL;DR: A much smaller gaming industry was enshitified at an alarming pace, barely after it got started. There were too many competing options, many of which were sub-par experiences, and there was no way to tell until after purchase.
Perhaps that’s not directly comparable, but to my eye, the biggest similarity is not enough value for the liquidity (disposable capital) people are willing to put forward on a product. At some point, people will just spend less or spend on something else entirely.
Meanwhile, you have older gamers like myself that are more than happy to take a trip down memory lane, since a few decades can make those old games fun again. I’m in this 14%. That said, I tend to buy new indie titles, mostly due to the lower pricepoint, lower expectations, reliably better art, lower system specs, smaller time commitment, and so on. Games like Assasin’s Creed Odyssey showed me that big studios aren’t necessarily pushing more and interesting narrative into monster-sized titles, opting for cut/paste easter-egg hunts and aftermarket content purchases instead. Less really can be more.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
older gamers like myself that are more than happy to take a trip down memory lane
Not only memory lane, but stuff like ROM hacks and randomizers can make new games from their retro roots. Hell I’ve gotten back into Doom in the past few years, and people just basically never stopped making new (free) levels for that since it came out 30+ years ago.
dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Hell I’ve gotten back into Doom in the past few year
There’s also the Quake Brutalist Jam 3 that came out last month. It’s playable with a modern Quake I engine, and man, some of those levels are incredible.
All for the low-low price of $0.
mrnngglry@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
The gaming industry turned its back on gamers a long time ago by making it difficult to truly own a game. It’s no wonder people want to go back and play old games that don’t rely on a server somewhere that could be shutdown at any point.
solidheron@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Micro transactions weren’t addictive enough. Games should sell bump of heroin
Bazell@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Games are games. Doesn’t matter when they were made. Especially, if they are better than modern ones.
Raiderkev@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Maybe don’t make everything a micro transaction grindfest and actually make a good game. Outside of Nintendo which I play with my kids, I hardly fuck with new games. I’ve skipped the last gen of consoles because I can’t fucking stand modern gaming, and I honestly don’t think I’ve missed anything important. I know I’m painting with a broad brush, but for the most part I don’t think I’ve missed anything extraordinary. I’m sure I’ll get GTA 6 as long as my 2020 mid ass gaming laptop can support it, but I’ve grown very jaded about the gaming industry. It feels like games are designed by the C-suite and not gamers these days.
Sunsofold@lemmings.world 1 month ago
Let them die. AAA games are games built to be marketed, not played.
REDACTED@infosec.pub 1 month ago
Damn, I guess I’ll just delete GTA games, cyberpunk, Witcher, Skyrim and others because it was just marketing
Sunsofold@lemmings.world 1 month ago
Cool. Welcome to the world of options that exist outside of designed by committee, mass market, crowd pleaser, middle of the road, mechanically stagnant gaming.
It’s telling that your prime examples of AAA are games that choke on their own development but ultimately only offer bigness as their value. Big maps… big, mostly empty maps. Big crowds of NPCs… that do the same three idle animations, duck and cover like a choreographed team at a gun shot and then go back about their day 30 seconds later. Big, powerful engines… with big piles of bugs that take a year of dev time after release to fix. Big texture files… that you probably don’t notice because you’re playing on less than top of the line hardware or just ignore if you aren’t. Big ‘storylines’… that ultimately end up being ‘choose path A or B and then shoot/stab a giant pile of mostly similar enemies,’ and 95% of your game time is the distraction of sidequests you wander into with no effect on the main story. Big collections of voice acted lines… saying generic things and repeating them so often they hit you like an arrow to the knee. Big teams… that get so big they have to have meetings about their meetings with the meetings team before scheduling a meeting with someone from art, marketing, sound, code, and three other people to decide whether its reasonable to have a meeting about adding a hair to the dog in side quest 37.
So, yeah, welcome to the part if gaming where you experience the small, but meaningful. ‘To the Moon’ is never going to have an impressive trailer, but it might make you weep, if you have the heart for it. Disco Elysium doesn’t have square lightyears of map to wander, but its creators paid attention to everything you can see. Pacific Drive was made by a team of less than a dozen people, but was put together with incredible skill and artistry. Bullets Per Minute took an idea many have had and made it real, and even did a great job of it. Quality over quantity, every time.
neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
I started being done with modern games around the ps4 era. Things have not gotten better since then. I just bought a ps3 and it feels great to just put in a disk and boot up a game.
I admit there are some games that ask you to update them but it has not been madatory for me yet. I just got the system and am still exploring it. But, a ps3 super slim with 23 good games for about $100 is better than any AAA experience you will get for the same money.
I am not even going to pirate games since they are so cheap. The only exception will be in cases where there is not an option to get a disk.
spicehoarder@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
I think you can still update ps3 games, I was forced to update the blue ray certificate (I think) recently. Also I think newer disks can contain patches
jqubed@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 1 month ago
saturn_888@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
You know, maybe if you could buy physical disks and cards of games that dont require internet access (unless it has specific online features like trade, battles, co-op, etc) And the games were actually good and not corporate slop then maybe we’d want them
grahamja@reddthat.com 1 month ago
I out an origonal halo 2 disc into a brand new xbox a couple of years ago. It refused to read it. My switch wants me to pay a subscription to play SNES games. As it turns out everything after the 3ds and the 360 was a mistake.
Banana@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
That sucks, I can still play original disks on my PS2 (excellent system btw)
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I mean ive thought of this. I mostly do play pre 2002 games. And I’m always thinking wow, they put so much work into this, no vibe coded bullshit, no endless updates, working with difficult hardware , mad respect for those devs. And I feel a little bad I can enjoy their creations 20 years later and they’re not getting anything for it.
However we know what’s coming. Corporations aren’t dumb, they see this, and in a couple years there will be a huge crackdown on retro gaming. So enjoy while you can, they’re coming for you.
moonrise4551@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
I gave my wife my LCD steam deck that she’s been eyeing up since the switch went and died. I loaded animal crossing from GameCube on it and she loves it, she played new horizons on the switch and liked it too but she said she enjoys the GameCube one more
rabber@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
They don’t make good games anymore so I keep returning to classics. Bf6 is the only AAA game I’ve enjoyed in years and it’s still kind of shit
mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
is Witcher 3 a AAA game? because I enjoyed that. also Helldivers2
but uhh yeah I ain’t really played any others that I can recall since playing kino der toten
rabber@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Dude Witcher 3 came out over 10 years ago! Haha
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 month ago
They don’t make good games anymore
okay you have GOT to play Sea of Stars. You ever want to play Chrono Trigger with a friend or spouse? It’s 3 player Chrono Trigger and the story is good.
rabber@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Thanks for the rec! Tons of great indies. I was referring specifically to huge budget games
brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
I fucking hated Garl. He had the same energy as “who had a better story than Bran” in GoT.
But everyone in the game loved him so much more than I could even imagine.
Anyway, the game is alright. A few too many nods to old RPGs and, imo, it didn’t stand on its own well enough.
Jayjader@jlai.lu 1 month ago
As soon as I can assemble my own polycule, this will be the first game we play.
Followed by Slay the Spire 2 co-op.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I loved 2042 after they patched it but haven’t been able to get into 6 really
rabber@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
I refunded 2042 so can’t really compare. But basically… It just plays really well. The guns feel very satisfying to use. Conquest mode feels like a true return to form. Great sound design and visuals.
Bf1 is my favourite in the series for reference having played all except 2042.
I doubt I’ll reach more than a few hundred hours in bf6 before I uninstall forever and go back to playing bf1 and bf4.
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Greed can be like that. Stop being greedy and your fans may come back
InFerNo@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
It’s only retro if it’s a modern thing made to look old, otherwise it’s vintage.
MrPnut@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’m still playing thru ps2’s massive library. No need for modern games here
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This is /v/, which means this post is behind over 9000 layers of sarcasm.
Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
All of which this platform will be oblivious to, because Lemmy just doesn’t do satire.
Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Lemmy hates the shit out of satire lol
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Lemmy is a big guy.
FreshLight@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Lemmy is still a relatively young community. I bet it gets better with time. I like to think that I already noticed small (and healthy) community growths.
And I do not have a metric nor an example. This is super vague, I know.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Lemmy does satire all the time, you’re just not reading it.
The problem that you are trying to identify is that satire needs to actually be satirizing something, ie, the context must be clear, and many people just assume the context in their head is the same as the context in everyone else’s heads.
You can see this illustrated by all the sarcasm that your comment has generated.
Now that the context is clear.
polotype@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
I took it as satire too, but what tells it’s /v/ ?
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
The blue colorscheme indicates it’s from one of the non-18+ boards, and /v/ is the one of those that it would fit the most.
Technically you can set any board to any of a bunch of color schemes, but most users just leave the defaults or pick on dark theme for all of them.
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Blue board talking about game industry stuff, it’s the only place that fits.